Ayana Mathis’ ‘The Twelve Tribes of Hattie’ at Library

After 25 years of celebrating the people, history, and spirit of our area, “The Heartland Series” fell victim to the economic times and ceased production.

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By Susie Stooksbury/Special to The Oak Ridger

Oakridger - Oak Ridge, TN

By Susie Stooksbury/Special to The Oak Ridger

Posted Feb. 11, 2013 at 7:58 PM
Updated Feb 11, 2013 at 8:01 PM

By Susie Stooksbury/Special to The Oak Ridger

Posted Feb. 11, 2013 at 7:58 PM
Updated Feb 11, 2013 at 8:01 PM

After 25 years of celebrating the people, history, and spirit of our area, “The Heartland Series” fell victim to the economic times and ceased production. While WBIR-TV has continued to rerun the show, Bill Landry, Heartland's genial host, has written a wonderful book highlighting some of the stories chronicled and the many people who brought them to life. “Appalachian Tales & Heartland Adventures” (976.800) takes us behind the scenes of the “most successful local TV show in the region's history.”

Young Hattie and August Shepherd leave the confines of Georgia in 1925 for Philadelphia to make a new life for themselves as they await the birth of their twins. But when the babies are seven months old, they come down with pneumonia and die taking with them Hattie's joy in life and belief in love. The nine children who follow will only see Hattie as a stern woman they call the General — and their lives will suffer for it. In her debut novel, and Oprah Winfrey book club pick, Ayana Mathis tells the stirring story of “The Twelve Tribes of Hattie.”

The League of Women Voters recently enjoyed a talk by Jay Erskine Leutze, a non-practicing attorney from North Carolina who led the fight against a mining company that wanted to, in essence, destroy a mountain near the Appalachian Trail. It began in 1999 with a phone call from 14-year-old Ashley Cox and her Aunt Ollie asking him to help them stop the Clark Stone Company from turning Belview Mountain, their home, into a gravel mine. Leutze fills in the exciting details in “Stand Up That Mountain: the Battle to Save One Small Community in the Wilderness along the Appalachian Trail” (338.272).

As we wait for Kinsey Milhone's next alphabetically titled mystery, author Sue Grafton has prepared a rare treat. “Kinsey & Me: Stories” (M) brings us nine finely crafted short stories featuring the Santa Teresa detective, plus 13 pieces about a girl named Kit Blue. Grafton wrote these autobiographical bits during the years following her alcoholic mother's death but before Kinsey had taken shape in her mind, and she used these stories to help her cope with and understand her family's dysfunction and the effect it had on her life.

Mystery fans who bid a sad farewell to Ian Rankin's popular John Rebus in 2009's “Exit Music” will be delighted to know that he is back. Rebus is now a civilian hired on to review cold cases for the Serious Crime Review Unit at the Lothian and Borders Police station — he even comes under the careful scrutiny of Malcolm Fox, another of Rankin's series characters. “Standing in Another Man's Grave” (M) involves a 10-year-old case concerning a missing girl. When the girl's mother points out the similarities between her daughter's disappearance and that of two other girls in the same area, Rebus decides to take a closer look.

Page 2 of 2 - In 1962, Drs. James D. Watson, Francis Crick and Maurice Wilkins were awarded a Nobel Prize for their discovery of the structure of DNA. Six years later, Watson wrote his own account of their monumental work in “The Double Helix,” which met with great success despite Crick's objections. Two of Watson's colleagues at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, Alexander Gann and Jan Witkowski, have now expanded his original book to include the stories of Crick, Wilkins, Rosalind Franklin, and the other researchers involved in the ground-breaking endeavor in “The Annotated and Illustrated Double Helix” (572.860).